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April 18, 2013

Book Review: The Infinite Resource by Ramez Naam

In an earlier blog article, I mentioned Autodesk's relationship with Ramez Naam through our work with Singularity University. Ramez was kind enough to send me a copy of his book, The Infinite Resource: the power of ideas on a finite planet. On Monday I finished the book and wrote this review. When I reviewed high-tech, high-touch customer service by Micah Solomon (blog article), instead of writing summaries of each chapter, I created some images in the style of Jessica Hagy'sIndexed blog. I thought I would try that again.

The Rise of Innovation

"[After] the fall of Rome,... China was undoubtedly the richest and most populous empire on Earth. Why then didn't the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution happen in China?" page 14

The Incredible Present

"The average resident of Shenzhen, China, or Hyderabad, India, or even Laos, Nigeria, has access to conveniences and capabilities that Crassus or Julius Caesar or Napoleon or any host of emperors of the past would have killed for." page 33

Running Out of Steam

"Somehow, after growing steadily in numbers, in sophistication, and in the scale of projects for well over a thousand years, Mayan civilization collapsed almost completely in a matter of decades." page 38

Peak Everything?

"The world has about 1.8 hectares of useful living land per person on it. Yet the average citizen of the world uses up 2.7 hectares of that land via their lifestyle. (A hectare is around 2.5 acres, so that's around 6.7 acres.)" page 59

Greenhouse Earth

"In 1850 [Glacier Park] was home to 150 active glaciers. In 2004 the number was 27. By 2030, at the current rate, and perhaps much sooner, there may be no glaciers left in the park at all." page 61

End of the Party?

"We live in the most perilous of times. We have unprecedented wealth, prosperity, and global well-being. Yet we have made unprecedented withdrawals from our planet to get there." page 88

The First Energy Technology

"The next frontier for farming is the world's oceans... The key to saving the fish in our oceans will be to transform from a culture of hunting fish to one of farming fish." pages 110-111

The Transformer

"In a seminal paper with the humble title Endogenous Technical Change, [Paul] Romer was the first economist to produce a model of economic growth that featured technological change as a key variable within the model... Romer coined [a] recipe metaphor to explain the distinction between designs (which are a kind of knowledge) and ingredients (physical resources) to non-economists." page 119

The Substitute

"Everywhere we look, when resources are scarce or prices high, innovators flock to the task of finding a substitute." page 133

The Reducer

"Everywhere we look, innovation has reduced the amount of energy, water, land, raw materials, and labor needed to accomplish a task." page 138

"The learning curve is a gradual reduction in the price of any manufactured good that comes from making more of it. As more of something is created, producers learn various ways of make it more cheaply. They find ways to save steps in the manufacturing process. They reduce duplication of effort. Workers get more skilled and more efficient at what they do." page 141

The Recycler

"Through innovation, we've dropped the energy needed to turn salt water into fresh by a factor of 9." page 150

The Multiplier

"In 2010 the world spent more than $4.3 trillion on insurance of all sorts — health, home, vehicle, life, and others... It's time to take out just a little bit of insurance against the risks that fossil fuels create. And the best way to do [that] is to invest in boosting our rate of innovation." page 178

Investing in Ideas

"In the United States, the fraction of college graduates receiving degrees in an engineering discipline has dropped by nearly half since the mid-1900's... [Recent data shows that] students with degrees in mechanical engineering had a 2010 unemployment rate of 3.8%. Students with degrees in physics, electrical engineering, and environmental science all had unemployment rates of 5% or lower. By contrast, graduates with degrees in library science, fine arts, and clinical psychology all had unemployment rates of 15% or more. Yet... student loans are agnostic to a student's major. [We should] give better [loan] terms and financial incentives to students entering technology fields. Give less favorable terms to students entering majors where unemployment is high or wages are low." page 187

The Flaw in the Market

"If we want to solve our problems today, then we must make sure that the power of self-interest is fully engaged. If we want to save the world, we have to make sure people can get rich — or at least make a good living at it — by doing so. There's one problem. Capitalism has a flaw... The more people the value of a common resource is spread across, the less incentive there is for each person to care for it, to protect it, to take pains not to damage it, or work to improve it. That's true of a river, a budget, a public park, an ocean full of fish, a rainforest, or a planet's atmosphere." pages 193-194

Market Solutions

"The point of a carbon tax [or cap/trade policy] is that when a consumer or business executive decides how to spend their dollars, they become more likely to spend them on goods or services that emit less or no carbon, and that, in so doing, they drive the competitive marketplace to emit less carbon overall and to innovate in ways to reduce carbon at even lower prices. That's it. Mixing the issue with anything else only muddies the waters." page 218

The Unthinkable: Here There Be Dragons

"'Nuclear power plants are, next to nuclear warheads themselves, the most dangerous devices that man has ever created.' source: Greenpeace InternationalActually as it turns out, that mantle should be given to coal plants [mining accidents, pollution, CO2 emissions], the devices that already kill far more people than nuclear power ever has, which contribute more than any other devices to climate change, and which newer, safer, cheaper reactors [e.g., Fast, traveling wave] could replace." page 235

The Unthinkable: Climate Engineering

In the town of Scwarze Pumpe, Germany, a coal-fired plant produces 30 megawatts of power but emits virtually no carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Instead, the CO2 produced by burning coal is captured, condensed into a liquid, and pumped half a mile down into a natural sandstone cavern capped by a 700-foot-thick layer of impermeable clay. page 237

"One approach is to use carbon sequestration to capture CO2 from the open air... A 1 gigawatt nuclear reactor or solar or wind farm could capture and sequester the carbon released from 6 similar-capacity coal plants or 12 similar-capacity natural gas plants." pages 241

"Every ton of CO2 pulled out of the atmosphere should be rewarded by a bounty." pages 241-242

Greener Than Green

"[Organic farming] uses less pesticide and less fertilizer. There's less nitrogen runoff from them. Organic farms use fewer fossil fuels per acre of crops. But organic crops have a tremendous downside. They grow less food per acre. And as a result, they use more land. If we wanted to reduce pesticide use and nitrogen runoff by turning all of the world's farming to organic farming, we'd need around 50% more farmland today. Would we rather have pesticides on farmland and nitrogen runoffs from them? Or would we rather chop down more forest [to make room for more farmland]?" pages 246-247

"Corn and sugarcane typically get yields that are about 70% higher than those of wheat or rice. Corn and sugarcane have the advantage of a new, better form of photosynthesis called C4 that has evolved in the last 30 million years. Plants that use older C3 photosynthesis have to open their pores to absorb CO2 during the heat of day... As a result, they lose moisture to the air. Plants that use C4 inhale CO2 at night, when it's cool... By doing that, they hang on to more water and capture almost twice as much of the sun's energy as calories than do C3 plants... Now an international team of [genetically-modified-organism] scientists is working to move the genes from C4 photosynthesis from corn and sugarcane into rice... [With success,] they'd be achieving some of the goals of organic farming — growing food in a more environmentally friendly manner, while still feeding the world [without cutting down the forests]." page 249

The Decoupler

"...pollution rises until a country reaches a certain level of wealth, [consumption flattens,] and then pollution comes down. People who recently come out of poverty, who remember a time when there wasn't enough to eat, who are still trying to save up to buy their first car, or expand their home, or ensure that their children can get an education, just don't prioritize environmental protection highly. But as people get richer, they begin to care." page 276

"In the United States, Canada, Europe, and Japan, wealth has doubled in the last 40 years, with almost no change in the use of energy, even after adjusting for globalization and the import of manufactured goods from places like China." page 278

Of Mouths and Minds

"...it appears that the innovation people produce routinely outstrips the ecological cost of those additional people. Evidence from both ancient civilizations and modern civilizations suggests that, as the number of people in an area rise, their total rate of innovation rises faster than the population and faster than consumption." page 288

Easy Way, Hard Way

"Innovation is the ultimate source of our wealth. New ideas have multiplied the resources we have access to; have reduced the amount of land, energy, and raw materials we need to accomplish any task; have created substitutes for every resource we've been in danger of exhausting in the last 500 years; have grown our ability to recycle waste into things of value; and have, in recent years, begun to decouple our economic growth from our levels of consumption and environmental change." page 293

As an Autodesk employee, a supplier of tools to designers, I was particularly fond of a passage in Chapter 7:

The bow and arrow... allowed humans to do more with less... It increased the efficiency with which humans could gather the energy most vital to their survival... The real value in the bow and arrow is its design. Its utility comes not primarily from its parts (which are abundant), not primarily from the labor to construct it (which is minor compared to its benefits), but from the precise way in which those pieces fit together and work together to create something greater than the sum of their parts. The key ingredient that adds the value to the pieces and the labor is the human knowledge. That knowledge transforms the inert matter into a powerful tool. page 106

This book might be the most comprehensive book I have ever read. It covers everything from how do we fix our broken schools to will I ever drive an electric car? Overall the book is very thorough — perhaps too thorough? Many of the author's arguments were convincing to me without the fifth or sixth cited reference to a scientific study or op-ed piece by an industry expert. It is nice that each chapter starts with a story, often a personal anecdote from the author, and is then followed by related facts and theories. Overall I recommend this book!

Books like this capture why Autodesk employees are so passionate about working here. Our customers make things. They imagine, design, and create them. We are happy to do our part to supply tools that help tap into the infinite resource of ideas that will make our world a better world. The book concludes with a utopian description of the earth in the year 2100 with 10 billion people. At Autodesk, we want to help build that vision!

Comments

Book Review: The Infinite Resource by Ramez Naam

In an earlier blog article, I mentioned Autodesk's relationship with Ramez Naam through our work with Singularity University. Ramez was kind enough to send me a copy of his book, The Infinite Resource: the power of ideas on a finite planet. On Monday I finished the book and wrote this review. When I reviewed high-tech, high-touch customer service by Micah Solomon (blog article), instead of writing summaries of each chapter, I created some images in the style of Jessica Hagy'sIndexed blog. I thought I would try that again.

The Rise of Innovation

"[After] the fall of Rome,... China was undoubtedly the richest and most populous empire on Earth. Why then didn't the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution happen in China?" page 14

The Incredible Present

"The average resident of Shenzhen, China, or Hyderabad, India, or even Laos, Nigeria, has access to conveniences and capabilities that Crassus or Julius Caesar or Napoleon or any host of emperors of the past would have killed for." page 33

Running Out of Steam

"Somehow, after growing steadily in numbers, in sophistication, and in the scale of projects for well over a thousand years, Mayan civilization collapsed almost completely in a matter of decades." page 38

Peak Everything?

"The world has about 1.8 hectares of useful living land per person on it. Yet the average citizen of the world uses up 2.7 hectares of that land via their lifestyle. (A hectare is around 2.5 acres, so that's around 6.7 acres.)" page 59

Greenhouse Earth

"In 1850 [Glacier Park] was home to 150 active glaciers. In 2004 the number was 27. By 2030, at the current rate, and perhaps much sooner, there may be no glaciers left in the park at all." page 61

End of the Party?

"We live in the most perilous of times. We have unprecedented wealth, prosperity, and global well-being. Yet we have made unprecedented withdrawals from our planet to get there." page 88

The First Energy Technology

"The next frontier for farming is the world's oceans... The key to saving the fish in our oceans will be to transform from a culture of hunting fish to one of farming fish." pages 110-111

The Transformer

"In a seminal paper with the humble title Endogenous Technical Change, [Paul] Romer was the first economist to produce a model of economic growth that featured technological change as a key variable within the model... Romer coined [a] recipe metaphor to explain the distinction between designs (which are a kind of knowledge) and ingredients (physical resources) to non-economists." page 119

The Substitute

"Everywhere we look, when resources are scarce or prices high, innovators flock to the task of finding a substitute." page 133

The Reducer

"Everywhere we look, innovation has reduced the amount of energy, water, land, raw materials, and labor needed to accomplish a task." page 138

"The learning curve is a gradual reduction in the price of any manufactured good that comes from making more of it. As more of something is created, producers learn various ways of make it more cheaply. They find ways to save steps in the manufacturing process. They reduce duplication of effort. Workers get more skilled and more efficient at what they do." page 141

The Recycler

"Through innovation, we've dropped the energy needed to turn salt water into fresh by a factor of 9." page 150

The Multiplier

"In 2010 the world spent more than $4.3 trillion on insurance of all sorts — health, home, vehicle, life, and others... It's time to take out just a little bit of insurance against the risks that fossil fuels create. And the best way to do [that] is to invest in boosting our rate of innovation." page 178

Investing in Ideas

"In the United States, the fraction of college graduates receiving degrees in an engineering discipline has dropped by nearly half since the mid-1900's... [Recent data shows that] students with degrees in mechanical engineering had a 2010 unemployment rate of 3.8%. Students with degrees in physics, electrical engineering, and environmental science all had unemployment rates of 5% or lower. By contrast, graduates with degrees in library science, fine arts, and clinical psychology all had unemployment rates of 15% or more. Yet... student loans are agnostic to a student's major. [We should] give better [loan] terms and financial incentives to students entering technology fields. Give less favorable terms to students entering majors where unemployment is high or wages are low." page 187

The Flaw in the Market

"If we want to solve our problems today, then we must make sure that the power of self-interest is fully engaged. If we want to save the world, we have to make sure people can get rich — or at least make a good living at it — by doing so. There's one problem. Capitalism has a flaw... The more people the value of a common resource is spread across, the less incentive there is for each person to care for it, to protect it, to take pains not to damage it, or work to improve it. That's true of a river, a budget, a public park, an ocean full of fish, a rainforest, or a planet's atmosphere." pages 193-194

Market Solutions

"The point of a carbon tax [or cap/trade policy] is that when a consumer or business executive decides how to spend their dollars, they become more likely to spend them on goods or services that emit less or no carbon, and that, in so doing, they drive the competitive marketplace to emit less carbon overall and to innovate in ways to reduce carbon at even lower prices. That's it. Mixing the issue with anything else only muddies the waters." page 218

The Unthinkable: Here There Be Dragons

"'Nuclear power plants are, next to nuclear warheads themselves, the most dangerous devices that man has ever created.' source: Greenpeace InternationalActually as it turns out, that mantle should be given to coal plants [mining accidents, pollution, CO2 emissions], the devices that already kill far more people than nuclear power ever has, which contribute more than any other devices to climate change, and which newer, safer, cheaper reactors [e.g., Fast, traveling wave] could replace." page 235

The Unthinkable: Climate Engineering

In the town of Scwarze Pumpe, Germany, a coal-fired plant produces 30 megawatts of power but emits virtually no carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Instead, the CO2 produced by burning coal is captured, condensed into a liquid, and pumped half a mile down into a natural sandstone cavern capped by a 700-foot-thick layer of impermeable clay. page 237

"One approach is to use carbon sequestration to capture CO2 from the open air... A 1 gigawatt nuclear reactor or solar or wind farm could capture and sequester the carbon released from 6 similar-capacity coal plants or 12 similar-capacity natural gas plants." pages 241

"Every ton of CO2 pulled out of the atmosphere should be rewarded by a bounty." pages 241-242

Greener Than Green

"[Organic farming] uses less pesticide and less fertilizer. There's less nitrogen runoff from them. Organic farms use fewer fossil fuels per acre of crops. But organic crops have a tremendous downside. They grow less food per acre. And as a result, they use more land. If we wanted to reduce pesticide use and nitrogen runoff by turning all of the world's farming to organic farming, we'd need around 50% more farmland today. Would we rather have pesticides on farmland and nitrogen runoffs from them? Or would we rather chop down more forest [to make room for more farmland]?" pages 246-247

"Corn and sugarcane typically get yields that are about 70% higher than those of wheat or rice. Corn and sugarcane have the advantage of a new, better form of photosynthesis called C4 that has evolved in the last 30 million years. Plants that use older C3 photosynthesis have to open their pores to absorb CO2 during the heat of day... As a result, they lose moisture to the air. Plants that use C4 inhale CO2 at night, when it's cool... By doing that, they hang on to more water and capture almost twice as much of the sun's energy as calories than do C3 plants... Now an international team of [genetically-modified-organism] scientists is working to move the genes from C4 photosynthesis from corn and sugarcane into rice... [With success,] they'd be achieving some of the goals of organic farming — growing food in a more environmentally friendly manner, while still feeding the world [without cutting down the forests]." page 249

The Decoupler

"...pollution rises until a country reaches a certain level of wealth, [consumption flattens,] and then pollution comes down. People who recently come out of poverty, who remember a time when there wasn't enough to eat, who are still trying to save up to buy their first car, or expand their home, or ensure that their children can get an education, just don't prioritize environmental protection highly. But as people get richer, they begin to care." page 276

"In the United States, Canada, Europe, and Japan, wealth has doubled in the last 40 years, with almost no change in the use of energy, even after adjusting for globalization and the import of manufactured goods from places like China." page 278

Of Mouths and Minds

"...it appears that the innovation people produce routinely outstrips the ecological cost of those additional people. Evidence from both ancient civilizations and modern civilizations suggests that, as the number of people in an area rise, their total rate of innovation rises faster than the population and faster than consumption." page 288

Easy Way, Hard Way

"Innovation is the ultimate source of our wealth. New ideas have multiplied the resources we have access to; have reduced the amount of land, energy, and raw materials we need to accomplish any task; have created substitutes for every resource we've been in danger of exhausting in the last 500 years; have grown our ability to recycle waste into things of value; and have, in recent years, begun to decouple our economic growth from our levels of consumption and environmental change." page 293

As an Autodesk employee, a supplier of tools to designers, I was particularly fond of a passage in Chapter 7:

The bow and arrow... allowed humans to do more with less... It increased the efficiency with which humans could gather the energy most vital to their survival... The real value in the bow and arrow is its design. Its utility comes not primarily from its parts (which are abundant), not primarily from the labor to construct it (which is minor compared to its benefits), but from the precise way in which those pieces fit together and work together to create something greater than the sum of their parts. The key ingredient that adds the value to the pieces and the labor is the human knowledge. That knowledge transforms the inert matter into a powerful tool. page 106

This book might be the most comprehensive book I have ever read. It covers everything from how do we fix our broken schools to will I ever drive an electric car? Overall the book is very thorough — perhaps too thorough? Many of the author's arguments were convincing to me without the fifth or sixth cited reference to a scientific study or op-ed piece by an industry expert. It is nice that each chapter starts with a story, often a personal anecdote from the author, and is then followed by related facts and theories. Overall I recommend this book!

Books like this capture why Autodesk employees are so passionate about working here. Our customers make things. They imagine, design, and create them. We are happy to do our part to supply tools that help tap into the infinite resource of ideas that will make our world a better world. The book concludes with a utopian description of the earth in the year 2100 with 10 billion people. At Autodesk, we want to help build that vision!